Our project develops new valorisations of the Istanbul Land (Theodosian) Walls, working with communities to co-produce both situated and web-based, public-facing digital heritage interpretation resources that reflect non-official, hitherto unauthorised understandings of the Walls and their environs. The project also builds capacity, in line with the aims of the Newton Fund, through modelling heritage management/interpretation practice, digital technologies and community engagement within the heritage sector.

The Walls are an extensive part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They are an ancient structure, much modified in history, famously breached in the 1453 Conquest of Constantinople and now situated in a rapidly modernizing megacity. They have witnessed intercultural contact and conflict, from war to ‘gentrification’, sometimes involving involuntary displacements of communities. The Walls are officially valorized as tangible heritage, and the UNESCO statement of Outstanding Universal Value is based upon the ‘unique integration of architectural masterpieces that reflect the meeting of Europe and Asia over many centuries’. This has shortcomings related to scant engagement with, and involvement of, diverse stakeholder communities. To counter this, the project researchers will research and develop multi-perspectival narratives revalorizing the Walls in relation to different identities, experiences and attitudes to the past, proposing models for in-country urban heritage management/interpretation. This involves three interrelated uses of qualitative research into the lives, attitudes and understandings of heritage of community stakeholders:

  1. to inform more responsive, ‘bottom-up’ heritage management;
  2. to engage stakeholders as co-producers of public-facing heritage interpretation, in particular to produce in situ and online digital resources that valorize and present multiple stories;
  3. to rethink the Walls beyond the paradigm of tangible heritage, based on people’s ‘sense of place’.